New copyright consortium looks to set agenda for handling online video

A group of content owners has partnered with MySpace, Microsoft, and others to …

Media companies including Viacom, Microsoft, MySpace, Fox, NBC, and CBS have joined forces to develop a common standard for handling copyrighted video online.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both report that the as-yet-unnamed group will make an announcement later today in which it will set out a series of principles for dealing with copyrighted content. These include identifying and filtering out such content, and doing so before it becomes available to any users.

Google, which is reportedly in talks to join, has yet to do so. Why? Let's step into the Prognostication Chamber.

Google has just rolled out a similar set of tools for YouTube that allow for content filtering and tracking. So why would this group of media companies need to get together to spell out a set of principles? Because, learning from the music labels' experience with Apple, content owners don't want to see YouTube set the rules for how video clips will be handled. They are also not keen about delivering digital copies or digital fingerprints of all of their materials in different formats to each video-sharing site.

We're guessing that the ultimate goal of banding together to establish principles is to make sure that the content owners get to set the agenda, rather than having it set for them by video-sharing sites (such as how many seconds of copyrighted footage will trigger a block, etc.). This may even (eventually) include the creation of a central repository for the digital files that are needed in order for the filters to work.

For video-sharing sites, it could prove much easier to go along with such a system than to do no filtering at all and simply rely on DMCA takedown notices to keep infringing video off the site. Content owners have shown a recent willingness to sue companies like YouTube for abetting copyright infringement, even when abiding by DMCA rules. Who wants to risk a billion-dollar lawsuit when you could just go along with the system that the content owners want you to use?